MLB won't reinstate Shoeless Joe Jackson

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has denied a request to reinstate Shoeless Joe Jackson, so the player banned for the 1919 Black Sox scandal will remain on the ineligible list.

The Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum in Greenville, South Carolina, had appealed to Manfred earlier this year that Jackson, who died in 1951, has more than served his sentence after being banned by then-commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1920.

Arlene Marcley, 73, isn't even a baseball fan, but the founder of the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum has been crusading to clear a name she thinks has been unfairly tarnished, Arash Markazi writes.

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The museum, in a Facebook post Monday, said Manfred had replied with a letter dated July 20 that it "would not be appropriate for me to reopen this matter."

"The results of this work demonstrate to me that it is not possible now, over 95 years since those events took place and were considered by Commissioner Landis, to be certain enough of the truth to overrule Commissioner Landis' determinations," Manfred wrote to the museum.

Manfred said he also checked the records of commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti's review in 1989 that also declined to reinstate Jackson because the case was "now best given to historical analysis and debate as opposed to a present-day review with an eye to reinstatement."

Said Manfred of Giamatti's analysis: "I agree with that determination and conclude that it would not be appropriate for me to reopen this matter."

Jackson, who played with three teams from 1908 to 1920, finished his career with a .356 batting average and 1,772 hits. As a member of the Chicago White Sox, he allegedly took $5,000 while throwing the 1919 World Series along with seven teammates.